


Prom Night

by sevenofspade



Category: Locke & Key
Genre: Gen, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-14
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-07 22:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/753631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On their way to the drowning cave, Kinsey and her friends each have an idea about what lies behind the doors. One of them is right. (The question, of course, is: which one?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prom Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Who Shot AR (akerwis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/gifts).



> I couldn't not write fic for Locke&Key when I saw it was requested. Hopefully, you'll like reading this as much I liked writing it.
> 
> This story is canon-compliant up to Omega 3 and only contains very vague speculations for the rest of the storyline. It was inspired by this page in issue 2 of Crown of Shadows:http://oi44.tinypic.com/1r5dlf.jpg
> 
> Many thanks for the beta to [ollipop](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ollipop/pseuds/ollipop), who went above and beyond in betaing a story they had no canon-knowledge for.

1) Scot

It’s Prom Night and everyone is drunk into oblivion. Scot and Jamal have found beer in one of the upper caverns.

Down below the revels, into the caverns and in front of the Black Door, the Omega Gate to all the eldritch creatures H. P. Lovecraft never dreamed of, the creature who bears Bode’s face and wears Luke Caravaggio's soul rages.

But really, any plan that relies on teenagers not getting drunk on Prom Night was bound to fail anyway.

 

 

2) Jackie

They open the door and the room is filled with boxes of every size and shape.

The boxes are filled with light, all of them.

They quickly figure out that the light in the boxes is sunlight via the very scientific method of having Scott stick his arm into one up to the elbow. He has a sunburn when he takes it out.

Inside one of the boxes, a tiny thing the size of Kinsey’s hand made of mahogany, is a sweltering summer day at the beach, light golden and warm. In another box, a waist-high oaken chest, is pale white light and the crisp smell of snow on a winter morning.

When they get down to the party, Kinsey is so, so glad she kept the Summer Box when the shadows attack. She opens the box and the shadows fade away into nothing, leaving Bode exposed in the center of the dance floor.

Bode’s eyes are the colour of Zack’s long ago, in the early hours of the mornings, poison gold in the dark where no one watches. He’s wearing the Shadow Crown.

It’s amazing how much more motivated to save someone’s soul you are when they’re family and all your tears and fears are in your head.

 

 

3) Jamal

When the party is in full swing, Kinsey and the gang decide to explore the caves a bit.

Behind door n°3 is neither a car nor a LCD plasma TV, but rows upon rows of grey blobs in jars. Each of the jars is labeled with a name and a date.

The jar closest to the door is labeled “Benjamin Locke” and is dated 1805. The next is Miranda Locke, dated 2 years later. As they move down the rows, more names appear: Krogenns, Panys, Lukkos, Zameks, Trangkas and more. The Lockes outnumber the other 3:2. As they move closer to the end of the room, the dates come closer to the present day.

The next-to-last filled jar, after “Mark Cho”, “Kim Topher” and “Luke Caravaggio” but before “Ellen Whedon” is full of a mushy grey-ish substance streaked with red. The nametag reads “Rendell Locke”.

In a flash, Kinsey realises what the jars contain and throws up. The jars at her level are labelled "Duncan Locke", “Bode Locke”, “Kinsey Locke”, “Tyler Locke”, “Jackie Veda”, “Jamal Saturday”, “Scot Kavanaugh” and “Dodge”. These jars are empty.

All the brains of anyone who’s ever used a Key.

Dodge is dead, Kinsey killed him herself. But the jar for his brain is empty.

“We need to get everyone the fuck out of here,” Kinsey says. “Dodge is going to open the Black Door.”

She doesn’t know how or who Dodge is wearing at the moment, but like hell she’s letting him (it?) ruin Prom Night and rule the world.

Someway, somehow, everyone believes the lie about the incoming tide. Go Team Kinsey.

 

 

4) Kinsey

Later, after the thing with Dodge has been to Hell and back and come out the other way through pure horror and the back of Jackie’s skull, Kinsey finds refuge behind one of the doors inside the Drowning Cave.

The blood’s gotten everywhere, even here. There are splatters of blood stretching in a wide arc beyond the door, marring the metal contraption inside. It’s huge and ridiculous and shaped like a door into nowhere.

Kinsey blinks. She has enough of doors and keys and the bloodshed they bring.

She drags herself towards the gate. Her leg is mangled and useless below the knee, shards of bones sticking out. Scott taught her how to pick locks, a long time ago, when he put the knowledge in her head, back before hell came to Lovecraft again. The door opens easily, a simple three pin tumbler.

There is a Key. If the Timeturner Key and the Anywhere Key had a child who ran away to a circus ran by goths it might have looked something like this. She knows it’s a Key from the way the Whispering Iron sings into her bones when her fingers close around it.

She props herself up uneasily on her undamaged leg and holds out the Key into the opening.

She feels foolish but the Keys never cared how she felt before, ready as they were to mash her with their teeth and drag her down into their turning gears and widening gyres. Out loud, she says, “Bring me back so I can stop this,” inside her head she adds, ‘or so help me, I will burn this town to the ground if it’s the last thing I do’.

The portal opens, like a knife ripping through reality to the things beneath.

Kinsey stumbles through.

When she wakes up, her legs are whole and tonight is Prom Night.

**Author's Note:**

> In case the image is unaccessible, the relevant dialog is as follows:  
> Scot: What do you wish was in there?  
> Jackie: Sunlight.  
> Jamal: Brains in glass jars. Like, all geniuses.  
> Kinsey: An experimental time-travel machine. What about you, Scott?  
> Scot: Gah. I was thinking a room stocked with kegs of aged beer. You lot all daydream much bigger than I do.


End file.
